Apod 2.3

This week's picture is that of the Butterfly Nebula. The Butterfly Nebula was formed by one star of a binary star system ejecting large amounts of gas very quickly while the core of the star ionized the gas and made it glow the colors we can see or falsely color. The surface temp of the core, now called a white dwarf star, is estimated to be around 250 thousand degrees Celsius. Overall, the hot center of the Nebula is projecting the gas, some of which has been detected to be hydrogen, across light years and the Nebula itself only lies 4000 light years away.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111113.html

apod 2.2 submitted early

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111108.html
this weeks post is not a picture but instead a video of the phenomenon known as "sun dogs". The sun dog shown in the video is center stage and appears to be quickly jumping from place to place high within the clouds. The magic behind this wonderful show is currently hypothesized to be changes in an electrical field within the cloud quickly changing. this quick change would induces water crystals in the clouds to rearrange themselves and bend light in a different way with each change in the field. As amazing as this occurrence is, very little data is had on the phenomenon so scientist are scouring the world and the world wide web to find more evidence to analyze.

apod 2.1

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111102.html
This week's picture features the Wizard Nebula! Only 8000 light years away, this nebula is huge star forming region, NGC 7380 to be specific, and is really just a tower of super heated and super irradiated gasses and the actual star forming region is only 100 light years across. The wizard nebula lies in the constellation Cepheus and some of the stars forming in this nebula have the chance to out live our own sun! so in a few billion years, our ancestors, if still living, will be able to view the star clusters that this nebula will leave behind.